2025-11-22 –, Plenary Space
The climate crisis poses a severe threat to the natural systems that support modern civilization, disrupting essential cycles that provide freshwater, fertile soils, and stable weather patterns. These disruptions are projected to lead to widespread biodiversity loss and to upset local and global economies. To ensure that the scientific basis of these projections is transparent and credible, researchers globally are increasingly making climate data and models openly available. This openness supports informed decision-making and helps safeguard sustainable development from being compromised by short-term political or economic agendas.
Despite this progress in open science, the broader application of open source software and open data in climate and sustainability-related technologies remains limited. National governments, international organizations, academia, industry, and civil society have all played roles in both contributing to the crisis and proposing solutions. However, fragmented, proprietary approaches persist. Open source offers a powerful alternative—lowering costs, enhancing verifiability, and enabling collaboration across disciplines and sectors.
In this talk, I'll introduce OpenSustain.tech, the most comprehensive dataset of over 2,500 open source projects directly addressing the climate crisis. I'll detail the transparent methodology used to curate this collection, including human expert review across multiple fields, and talk a bit about the network of transitive dependencies among these projects, extending previous work in mapping the climate-focused open source ecosystem.
I'll talk about which projects are written in Python, and discuss which projects seem to be most relevant to the climate crisis. Finally, I'll discuss the strategic importance of open source and Python in advancing climate solutions.
This talk will be the second time I have given this talk, as earlier in the week I will be presenting a paper on the larger work at the OpenForum Academy Symposium in Rio, https://symposium.openforumeurope.org/. This talk will focus on the Python aspects as much as possible.
Anyone
Richard Littauer is a PhD student in Computer Science at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington in Pōneke, Aotearoa New Zealand. His thesis is on building tools for using community science data to model bird populations and bird flu. His research interests beyond that involve open science, open source, community science platforms, and taxonomy.
He is on the board for PythonNZ. He is also an organizer for SustainOSS, and has recorded hundreds of podcasts on open source sustainability there, and he is one of the two organizers of CURIOSS, the community for university and research institution open source program offices. In his spare time, he is a professional conlanger, creating languages for TV studios and novelists, an avid reader and hiker, and interested in civic, local action towards a more sustainable future.
But really, he just likes birds. You can read more about his projects at his website and follow him online.